The Christmas Kid Page 8

  “What do you want with me, Charlie?” he asked.

  “We’re gonna take a little trip over to Brooklyn, Red. Maybe down Gerritsen Beach. Somewhere. You’ll find out.”

  “And then what are you going to do?”

  “Kill you, Red. I got no choice.”

  “No,” Dano said. “I guess you don’t.”

  Leaving Paradise

  WHEN GILLIS OPENED HIS eyes, the window shade had rolled up on itself and the furnished room was sluiced with hard, white, merciless light. He didn’t move. His tongue felt thick and furry, and there was something ridged and padded over his right eye. His right hand lay flat beside the pillow, and he saw the raw, pink-skinned knuckles, and then he closed his eyes again, remembering Saturday night at the Paradise.

  No, no, he thought, that didn’t happen. But it had happened, all right, and as he returned, feeling a coarse gas moving between his brain and his skull and a dull pain throbbing in his shoulder and something sharp stabbing his ribs, Gillis saw fragments of the night before, like scenes from a movie with the reels mixed up.

  He saw the big pitchers of beer on the bare plastic-topped table in the booth along the wall of the huge saloon. He saw Curly and Vito laughing, and bowls of pretzels, and heard the jukebox pounding. The Stones: “Brown Sugar.” The dance floor full, and Vito talking about the girl from Coney Island and the things she could do, and Curly egging him on. The lights were dim, red, rose-colored, blood-colored, and the dance floor throbbed, and more people came in, guys and chicks, and a few old dudes, guys at least thirty, cruising around the edges of the hall, looking at the young women. Another tune:

  I’ll never be your

  beast of burden…

  Then as he turned again in bed, he saw the great blinking neon sign, bright against the Brooklyn sky: THE PARADISE. And being hurt. And voices. No. That was later. No, first there was the girl in the pink sweater. Or was that last week at the Paradise? He sat up in the narrow bed in the hot bright morning room and touched the ridge over his eye. A bandage. And remembered a dark-skinned doctor in the emergency room, leaning over him, his eyes large and tired, peering at him. No, that was later, too. That was all later.

  He was in the Paradise, he and Vito watching Curly dance with a green-eyed Puerto Rican girl, putting on all his baddest moves, chopping space out of the crowd, while more and more people came in, and the waitress brought more beer, and then Gillis glanced back at the door and he saw her. It was Cathy.

  “Hey, there’s that chick from the dry cleaner,” Vito said, his voice loud above the music. “The one you like, man. That Cathy.”

  She was wearing tight white jeans and a black turtleneck and high-heeled red shoes, and she was with a small, compact, red-haired guy in a sport jacket. They were walking to the corner where the Quiñones crowd hung out. Gillis hated that crowd. All of them went to college, and when he talked to them, Gillis felt slow and stupid. Quiñones was a tall Puerto Rican who wore blue blazers and gray socks, and always looked as if he knew something that nobody else knew. Gillis watched him embrace the short red-haired guy, and shake hands formally with Cathy.

  “Maybe she’s gonna leave the dry cleaner store,” Vito said. “Maybe she’s gonna go to college.”

  “Shut up, Vito, will you please?” Gillis said, and drank his beer. That’s when the girl with the pink sweater came in. Right there. Short, with a big pink hairdo, and chewing gum. Came right over and grabbed his hand and took him out on the floor. Rod Stewart singing “Passion.” The girl in the pink sweater chewing gum like it was her job. And Gillis saw Cathy dancing with the red-haired guy. She was staring right into the guy’s eyes. And the guy was dancing in a tight, bundled-up way, every move precise. Gillis felt big and clumsy.

  “That’s it,” he said to the girl in the pink sweater.

  “Whaddya mean? I’m just warmin’ up!”

  He walked away and she grabbed his arm and he pushed her and she tottered and fell. He heard her cursing, but Gillis kept walking to the booth. Curly was there, and the green-eyed Puerto Rican girl was dancing with Quiñones now, and Curly was dripping with sweat. Gillis lifted the pitcher in both hands and took a long swallow. Then the girl in the pink sweater stood over him.

  “You do that again, you big faggot, and I’ll kick your knees off.”

  “Get outta here while you can walk,” Gillis said, and the girl stalked off, and he sat there staring at the wet tabletop. Curly was laughing. He remembered that. Curly was laughing. And when he looked through the crowd, he saw Curly again, and he was laughing, and Quiñones was laughing, and the red-haired guy was laughing, too. Everybody was laughing.

  “Who is that guy, anyway?” he said. “The red-haired jerk.”

  And Curly said the guy’s name was Carder, or Carlton or something. Part of that college crowd. From Staten Island or someplace. Gillis remembered him vaguely now. In a sports car. A foreign job. Coming to the gas station. Alone. Always alone. Paid with a credit card, too. Now he’s with Cathy.

  “I thought you was goin’ with her, Gillis boy,” Curly said.

  “Hey, I just took her out a coupla times,” Gillis said, sipping from a glass now. “She’s nothin’. She don’t mean a thing to me. Not a thing.”

  “I don’t know, Gillis boy. You sure got a funny look on your face.”

  He remembered that, and drinking, and Vito dancing, and then Curly with the green-eyed Puerto Rican chick again, and more drinking, and the music pounding. And then he was pushing his way across the dance floor to the corner where the Quiñones crowd was standing, and he saw Cathy beside the red-haired guy, Carder, or Carlton, or whatever his name was. There was panic in her eyes. Her hand went to her throat.

  “Let’s dance,” he said.

  “Gillie, I’m with—”

  “I said, let’s dance,” he said, grabbing her wrist. You took what you wanted in this world. No other way. “Now!”

  And then he felt a sharp pain in his right arm, and the red-haired guy was in front of him, looking up in a cool way. He was smiling.

  “That’s bad manners, man,” the red-haired guy said, in a way that made Gillis afraid. “I think you ought to apologize. To Cathy. And to me.”

  And Gillis did what he had done so many times before; knowing what he would do, from beginning to end.

  “Let’s go outside,” Gillis said. “We’ll settle this there.”

  The red-haired guy was still smiling. “I don’t want a fight, pal,” he said. “I want an apology.”

  And Cathy said: “Oh, Gillis, stop, don’t ruin everything.”

  “Outside,” Gillis said.

  The red-haired guy shrugged, turned to Cathy, and sighed: “Wait here.” Quiñones was there now, trying to calm things down. Gillis remembered that; trying to settle it. But the red-haired guy was walking out the door past the bouncer, peeling off his coat, and then Gillis was behind him, and so were Curly and Vito and Quiñones, and then he and the red-haired guy faced each other in the parking lot.

  Gillis loaded up on the right hand, the right hand that had dropped so many other people in parking lots and outside bars and in school yards and on beaches. He came in a rush, and threw the right hand, and felt terrible pain in his belly, and then a swirl of chopping motions, and he looked up and saw the Paradise sign, and Curly’s astonished face. Then he was up, and then down again, his face in the gravel, something wet on his face and hands; blood. He got up one final time and hit the smaller man, but the smaller man was still smiling and then there was more pain, and a high, bright light, and broken pieces of speech, and a scream, and he was in the gravel again, and he stayed there, afraid. I can get up, he thought. But I won’t.

  “Stop,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Please stop.”

  And now he was in the furnished room, with the morning light as cruel as truth, thinking: Everything is different now. I dogged it, and they all know it. The little guy made me quit. I’ll never walk down the avenue the same way. I’ll never walk into the Paradis
e the same way or hang around the gas station the same way. Everything is different. And I hurt. I hurt.

  Lullaby of Birdland

  ONE MORNING THAT SPRING, Dwight Roberts first saw the horn man. Dwight and his mother were going down the stairs of the house on Gates Avenue, he to school and she to work, and the horn man was coming up. He was a large man, with hooded eyes that made him look Asian, tan skin, a wrinkled blue suit, and dirty black-and-white shoes. He had a cheap canvas suitcase in one hand and the horn, in a scuffed black case, in the other. He was wheezing.

  “’Scuse me,” he said in an exhausted voice. “Where’s 4D at?”

  “Keep climbin’,” said Dwight’s mother. “It’s in the back, right over us.” She paused. “You lookin’ for Jimmy?”

  “He moved,” the horn man said. “Went south.”

  The man paused, as if gathering strength, and resumed the climb.

  That evening they were having dinner, Dwight and his mother and his two little sisters, and first they heard the man walking, his tread heavy on their ceiling, and then the sound of water running. And then, suddenly, abruptly, they heard music. The windows were open to the warm spring air, and first there was a series of incredibly quick notes, up and down the scale, glistening, running, and then a shift into a beautiful, clear, lyrical song—a complaint, a sigh, a lament. Dwight Roberts had never heard anything like it before in his life.

  “Just what I thought,” Dwight’s mother said. “A musician. Now, you stay away from him, Dwight, boy, you hear? You stay away from that horn man.”

  “But why, Momma?” Dwight asked.

  “Cuz he be playin’ the devil’s music.”

  The horn man finished after twenty minutes, and in a while, they heard him thumping down the stairs into the night. The next day was Saturday, and in the spring morning, Dwight was reading a comic book on the stoop when a taxicab pulled up and the horn man got out. He looked up at the building and said to Dwight: “Need an elevator here. This ain’t human, man.”

  And hurried up the stoop.

  On Sunday mornings, Dwight and his mother and sisters always dressed for church. This was the most important day of Dwight’s mother’s life, the day she prayed for everybody: her mother, and President Truman, and the children, and Joe Louis, and Clark Gable, and even Dwight’s father, who’d gone out for a bottle of milk one night during the war and had never come back. On Sundays, starch cut Dwight’s neck; his sisters smelled like soap; his mother wore her blue hat with the white veil. Today was Sunday, and Dwight’s neck hurt.

  When they came out onto the stoop on Gates Avenue, the biggest car in the world pulled up to the curb. It was all shiny and black. A man with a cap was driving. The door opened and the horn man got out, and waved good-bye to a white woman. A white woman. The horn man looked bleary and surprised. He put the horn down.

  “Where the hell I’m at?” he asked as the limousine pulled away.

  “Brooklyn,” Dwight’s mother said sharply. “Outside the house you’re stayin’ at.” A pause. “On Sunday. The Lord’s Day.”

  “Well, abide by me, Momma,” the horn man said, smiling a big, wonderful smile. “And hey! Lay a little prayer on me, would ya, Momma? Like a good Baptist.”

  “I don’t even know your name,” Dwight’s mother said icily. The horn man lofted the scuffed black case.

  “Charlie Chan,” he said, bowing formally at the waist, and then hurrying up the stoop. Dwight had never seen his mother look the way she looked at that moment.

  The horn man did not go out that night, or the night after that, and, at dinner, Dwight wondered out loud if the man was all right. Dwight’s mother said he was probably worn out from sinning. Then Dwight said it would be Christian to bring the man some soup, and Dwight’s mother was trapped. The boy brought the bowl of soup upstairs, with a plate over the top to keep it from spilling. Then he heard the horn: the door to the roof was open and Dwight followed the sound. The man was standing on the roof in a gray bathrobe and street shoes, his eyes closed, playing his glistening horn for the trees and the backyards and the birds of Brooklyn.

  Dwight waited there, mysteriously chilled by the music, until the horn man finished. Then the man opened his eyes and looked at the boy and smiled. “What you got there, man? Oh, hey, chicken noodle! That for me? Chickendamnnoodle! The best! Damn!”

  He laid the horn against a chimney and took the bowl in both hands and drank greedily. Dwight offered him a spoon; he ignored it, and shoved the final noodle into his mouth with his fingers. Then he saw Dwight looking at the horn. “Go ahead, man. Give it a try.”

  Dwight lifted the horn, feeling the chill enter him again, and blew into it. Nothing happened. The man showed him how to hold it, where to put his fingers, how to breathe, and that evening on the roof on Gates Avenue, it began. He hummed a tune in bed. Over and over. A tune he learned from Charlie Chan. At the end of the week, the eleven-year-old boy could play “London Bridge” on this thing called an alto saxophone. He went up to the roof every day. The horn man was his teacher. The boy added “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” They met each evening on the roof, and played together for an hour, the boy bringing soup, the man full of music. After their session, the man went to work, way over in New York. Dwight’s mother began to include the man in her prayers. And Dwight told everybody he was going to be a musician just like Charlie Chan. Everyone except his mother.

  One afternoon, after playing stickball with his friends, he hurried to the family apartment. The kitchen window was open to the summer. His mother was beside it, listening to the music of the horn man drifting down from the roof. She was very still, her face lost in melancholy. Then she heard Dwight and turned.

  “Jus’ takin’ a break, son,” she said with a chuckle. “Need something to eat?”

  “No, Momma. I gotta go back. Just, you know—”

  He darted into the bathroom, closed the door. When he returned, he took a deep breath.

  “Momma, I wanna tell you something,” he said. “I want to be a musician. Just like Charlie Chan.”

  “No, no, no,” Dwight’s mother protested. “You’re gonna be a lawyer! A doctor! No musicians! Just look at that man. He plays. He plays real good. Sometimes, he plays…beautiful. And where’s he livin’? Right here with us! I don’t want you endin’ up where you started, Dwight Roberts!”

  But Dwight persisted. He took a summer job at a grocery store a few blocks away, saving money for his own Selmer. He found a radio station that played jazz. He learned sixteen bars of “April in Paris.” One evening, he even told Charlie Chan he wanted to be a musician.

  “Now, hold on, man,” Charlie Chan said. “You know what you’re saying? You know what it means, man? It means you gonna go to school, gotta learn to read, gotta learn harmony and composition. Not just play. You gotta create, man. You gotta know everything. Louis Armstrong, Stravinsky, Mahler, Bessie Smith, everything, man. You gotta see if you got it here,” he said, tapping his heart, “even more than up here,” he added, tapping his head. “You gotta have the other thing, too. You gotta have…I dunno, man. It’s mysterious. It ain’t got a name. Max got it. Dizzy got it. I got it. It don’t have a name. But you gotta have it, man. You gotta have it.” He looked sad. “It ain’t easy, man.”

  The next day, while he was working at the grocery store, Dwight Roberts heard the sound of the fire engines. They were screaming up Gates Avenue. Dwight went out to look, and saw in the distance that smoke was pouring from his own house. He ran all the way. The street was a wilderness of hoses, engines, a pumper, three police cars. Kids were clambering on the apparatus or watching from across the street. Then he saw his mother against the fence, shaking and sobbing. The horn man was beside her, his arm on her shoulder.

  “You be quiet now,” he was saying to her in a crooning, singsong voice. “You jus’ be calm, you jus’ be quiet.…”

  And Dwight ran over and heard the story, about the fire in the kitchen, and his sisters screaming, and the wall of flame, and how
the horn man was suddenly coming through the rooms, a blanket over him, grabbing kids, shoving his mother into the hall, the great large man knocking over furniture, shouting for them to get low, and then banging on all the doors on the way to the street. The apartment was ruined. But they were alive. And now the horn man was asking about the subway, his clothes gone, his horn in the rubble. He kissed Dwight’s mother, hugged Dwight, and started walking. Dwight shouted after him: “Where you goin’, Charlie Chan?”

  “I’ll be around,” the horn man said, and walked out of the neighborhood, and out of Dwight’s life. Dwight turned to his mother, who was sobbing and praying, waiting for a chance to inspect the ruins. She glanced at the corner where Charlie Chan had disappeared.

  “He was just like a bird,” she said. “Come here in the spring, and then flown away. Just like a bird.”

  The Boarder

  MISS FLANAGAN WAS FORTY-ONE when Mr. Macias came knocking at her door. He had a newspaper under his arm and a tentative look in his eyes. Did she have a room to rent? The words stumbled, then broke; his English was not good. But she understood. Yes, she had a room to rent.

  “Well,” he said. “I can see it, please?”

  She looked down at him; he was a small man with a neat mustache, a cheap brown suit wrinkling at elbow and knee, black-and-white shoes. On the stoop beside him there was a battered suitcase. His eyes convinced her to let him into the hall; they were filled with rejection, and on that subject Miss Flanagan was an expert.

  “Yes, of course.”

  The room was at the back of the parlor floor, directly off the stoop. When her parents were alive, they’d used it for a bedroom; her mother liked the view of the garden, the fireplace in winter, the parquet floors, the elegant molding that was popular when the old craftsmen built the brownstones in this part of Brooklyn. But Miss Flanagan could never sleep there; she felt as if she were usurping part of her own past. It was all right for strangers; it simply wasn’t for her. When she opened the oak door, with its solid-brass fittings, and showed the room to Mr. Macias, he issued an involuntary little breath of surprise.